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I've just stumbled on some really facinating technology in the past couple weeks. It's called tagging and it's gaining popularity fast. I have a suspicion this is going to be one of the biggest things to come out of the internet since friend based social networking. This article may not be brand new, but it does a great job of explaining what tagging is:

The more I dig into this stuff, the more facinated I am. It lets you categorize information by having your visitors submit tags along with their content. In the case of a forum, we could start listing some keywords we feel are related to each of our posts. A system will then calculate the most related threads not by the title of the post, but by the number of matching tags across the site.

43 Things has added a little twist. You create tags based on what you want out of life. You can then see who shares your wants and discuss how you're going to accomplish your goals. It's a really neat way to network people.

On a side note, many of the new tag based sites are being created with Ruby on Rails which is a new platform for web development. Ruby is similar to Python and perl and has been around for at least 10 years. Recently Ruby on Rails was released which makes building interactive websites a cinch. Some people claim it's even faster than PHP development.

The concept seems okay and even good, but I won't be surprised if it's short lived.
The other keyword system I remember that was user-defined (meta-keywords and other metatags) was quickly abused to the point of uselessness...

Community sites using this new tagging system will soon have to spend what could become a lot of effort policing it (how much depending on the size of the community), to keep it from being overrun with irrelevancy spam.

The concept seems okay and even good, but I won't be surprised if it's short lived.
The other keyword system I remember that was user-defined (meta-keywords and other metatags) was quickly abused to the point of uselessness...

Community sites using this new tagging system will soon have to spend what could become a lot of effort policing it (how much depending on the size of the community), to keep it from being overrun with irrelevancy spam.

Yes, there's definitely some policing that needs to be done, but that's the case with any community oriented format. I'm just looking over www.flickr.com and it's a very nice implementation of a Folksonomy. In a case like this, you'll only be spamming your photos, so it's an entirely different situation. If irrelevant keywords are used in the same tag list, the system will automatically ignore the tags that aren't common. So irrelevancy becomes less of a problem here because everything is based on checks and balances.

I've yet to see a good shopping based folksonomy site, but I'm sure they'll be coming soon. Hopefully from yours truely

I'm just looking over www.flickr.com and it's a very nice implementation of a Folksonomy. In a case like this, you'll only be spamming your photos, so it's an entirely different situation.

That's exactly where I'd expect the huge abuse. People putting a site URL across a pic, calling it "Paris Hilton," and...

On another note, too bad they've put that awful name (folksonomy) on the tech! It's disgustingly mushy and forced sounding.

I've yet to see a good shopping based folksonomy site, but I'm sure they'll be coming soon. Hopefully from yours truely

Hm, interesting concept... but how would a folksonomy be a substantial improvement for the user over, say, finding the product they want to talk about and then hitting "review this item?" Or is it just that it's the new "cool thing to do" that would be the draw...

That's exactly where I'd expect the huge abuse. People putting a site URL across a pic, calling it "Paris Hilton,"

One way to police the photos is to have buttons by each one for users to report spam or offensive material. If a photo gets enough warning flags, it can appear in an administrative area for editors to delete.

Hm, interesting concept... but how would a folksonomy be a substantial improvement for the user over, say, finding the product they want to talk about and then hitting "review this item?" Or is it just that it's the new "cool thing to do" that would be the draw...

And that's exactly why I think a folksonomy will do better than a standard review system. It's the catchy new thing. The net moves so fast that if you use the archaic keywords like review and wishlist, you won't be noticed. The newer keywords are right at the cusp and the more you can accomodate, the more likely it'll be for you to rank for them. Much less competition. The hard part is just keeping up with the cool and new trends.